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Free society means limited government, and the only way for the government to be in favor of that is for the government to vote against its own interests. I wo

by Joeri 5y ago

Free society means limited government, and the only way for the government to be in favor of that is for the government to vote against its own interests. I would argue that a free society protects people’s rights, and this is impossible without a strong government. As for voting against its own interests, the government in a true democracy is quite literally the will of the people. We get what we vote for. So if people in general are unhappy with the outcome it is democracy itself that has broken down. The solution to a broken democratic process is not to limit the consequences of that process by shrinking government, it is to fix what’s broken in the first place. In a healthy democracy the government will take up only the responsibilities people want it to take up, and no more than that.

mantas 5y ago
Depends on definition of „people’s rights“. If you want to ensure very basic rights, small government is fine. If you want affirmative action and all that jazz, then you’ll need big government. That will likely abuse tools meant for good to make society not free anymore.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
roenxi 5y ago
My government has just spent 2 years - a pretty significant percentage of a lifetime - working to keep me from travelling more than 5km from my home and made it illegal for me to see my friends. And I'm not even going to have a sympathetic audience if I try to claim this is against my wishes or wellbeing. Run me through, in simple terms, how much worse it could get? I suppose they aren't trying to kill me, which is a nice minimum standard? These people have no respect for my rights. They don't think my rights rate on the scale of their objectives. And they want to spy on my mail - possibly to figure out from my phone if I've gone 6km from my home? I would quite like strong encryption by default and a weak government, please.
- robbiep 5y ago
  Whilst you’re entitled to your opinion, it wasn’t 2 years, it was 6 months of not travelling to the regions in NSW: the rights that were protected were the rights to preservation of life as evidenced by the significantly lower excess mortality in Australia. You obviously value these things differently to me, and it’s hard to have this argument without conflating the other aspects of our federal government that I think we would absolutely agree with, but a once in several generations pandemic is a good reason to do something drastic
- radicalbyte 5y ago
  My government has restricted travel in order to stop a pandemic virus spreading to the point where hospitals are overwhelmed and we start seeing 10% of the population dying instead of 0.5%. Thankfully they have also implemented a nationwide vaccination scheme and a vaccination pass which is accepted pretty much anywhere worldwide.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a risk of 10% of the population dying. The disease isn't that deadly, even if the hospital system did give out (and the numbers I've been looking at seem to suggest that the risk of the hospital system giving out was oversold - it didn't look fun but it also didn't seem to buckle enough to justify the authoritarian response in my eyes). If I were being uncharitable towards people who basically put me under a form of house arrest - which I am - I might note that the government will only revoke my rights in a way justified by your poor grasp of the figures some of the time. Which is hardly comforting when people argue that strong governments will somehow protect me from a threat that only emanates from government. This "strong governments protect rights" argument is weak. Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government. Maybe "rights" is too strong a word, they're only applicable for about 90-95% of the time. "Privileges which only get stripped when they feel it is a good idea" is a mouthful though. The dust hasn't even settled enough to tell if the interventions worked. Anyway, they shouldn't be reading my mail. These people clearly don't represent the interests of a big chunk of the population. And me.
kragen 5y ago
That is the popular ideology that was used to justify most of history's worst atrocities. Piet Hein, who coordinated the Danish Resistance (which was, arguably, the will of the Danish people, though even today the Dansk Folkeparti has seats in parliament) satirized the situation in this grook, entitled Majority Rule, in 01969: His party was the Brotherhood of Brothers, and there were more of them than of the others. That is, they constituted that minority, which formed the greater part of the majority. Within the party, he was of the faction, that was supported by the greater fraction. And in each group, within each group, he sought the group that could command the most support. The final group had finally elected, a triumvirate whom they all respected. Now of these three, two had the final word, because the two could overrule the third. One of these two was relatively weak, so one alone stood at the final peak. He was: THE GREATER NUMBER of the pair which formed the most part of the three that were elected by the most of those whose boast it was to represent the most of most of most of most of the entire state — or of the most of it at any rate. He never gave himself a moment's slumber but sought the welfare of the greatest number. And all the people, everywhere they went, knew to their cost exactly what it meant to be dictated to by the majority. But that meant nothing, — they were the minority. ⁂ The idea of limited government I described, which is fundamental to liberalism, comes essentially from Locke's Two Treatises of Government in 01689. Rousseau responded in 01762 with the idea you so ably summarize, the absolute sovereignty of the "will of the people", in The Social Contract, calling it "the general will": https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/rousseau/social-contract/ch02.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/roussea.... Rousseau already recognized the failure mode Hein skewers in the grook above, but he hoped to avoid the formation of political parties. Condorcet's paradox showed that the will of the people was incoherent in 01785: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox In 01793, the will of the people decreed that the streets of Paris should run red with the blood of France's greatest and most honorable; Robespierre the Incorruptible carried out this Terror justified by Rousseau: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terror In 01850, the will of the people established the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring all government officials throughout the US to assist kidnappers of fugitive slaves, sending them back to the most abominable system of slavery humanity had ever known, a system itself established by the will of the people of the Southern States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850. A few short years later, the will of the people of the US decreed that those people should start killing one another en masse, ending with about a million dead, but four million delivered out of bondage. In 01918, the will of the people created the Solovki prison camp, which grew into GULAG over the next decades, through which 18 million people would be forced to labor for the will of the people; some 1.6 million died: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%A3%D0%9B%D0%90%D0%93 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%A3%D0%9B%D0%90%D0%93 In 01933, the will of the German people passed the Enabling Act, making Adolf Hitler dictator; before the war was out, the will of the people would murder ten million people in concentration camps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933 In 01951, Kenneth Arrow published his Impossibility Theorem, showing that the idea of the "will of the people" was incoherent in a far more comprehensive sense than Condorcet had ever imagined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem In 01958 the will of the Chinese people manifested in the Great Leap Forward, which Mao justified by explicit appeals to Rousseau's ideals. The largest famine in human history, or possibly the second largest, was the result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward In 01974 Hayek was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for explaining how voters and government institutions are unavoidably laboring in ignorance of much of the information needed to make the decisions that are optimal for the general welfare, while the price system can approximate those optimal decisions more closely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ... ⁂ The list of atrocities justified by the will of the people goes on and on: the Killing Fields, the Holodomor, the US system of mass incarceration, the Tutsi genocide, the Congolese civil war, the North Korean dictatorship, and on and on. You might protest that these atrocities were not in fact popular, that dictators were lying about what the people wanted; but by and large you would be incorrect. In other cases the policy of establishing limitless state power was popular, but the atrocities in which it inevitably culminated were not. That is the policy Rousseau advocated, and it is the policy you are advocating in your comment. In 01762 the idea that the will of the people could never err and would always promote the general welfare was an understandable error, but today we have ample evidence, evidence written in rivers of blood, that shows otherwise. Liberalism—giving individual people great freedom to dissent from the will of the people—works less badly. I know it's not very inspiring to chant "Our system works less badly!" but that's the best we can do so far. This does not necessarily imply "shrinking government", but it does imply strong limits on the powers in the hands of that government.
BurningFrog 5y ago
A government can be both limited and strong! Those are independent properties. If you don't see the distinction you will be hopelessly lost in these discussions.
RustyConsul 5y ago
A democratic government is a government built and run for the 51%. Technically, pure anarchy is the only form of government that is for the people by the people because... theres only the people. Not some entity set above and beyond the reaches of 'The people', with authority over the people. Not that i believe in anarchy as the epitome of governance, but Bakunin has left me slightly jaded ever since i read him in high school. I would agree with you that a free society is one that protects peoples rights. But... somewhere along the lines of social media and virtue signaling, protecting peoples right slowly transformed from the 'No-Harm principle' to 'Comply with X_Dogma or be canceled!'. This tendency has stiffled debate, taken away rights and shown the deep flaws in the democracy of a mob. Atleast in the US and the UK, these power structures that we have put in place are not for the people but are for the politicians within that government. If you are a democratic aspiring politician showing you can enforce paternalistic arguments among your populace is the key path to power. in Democracy, as soon as you put someone in 'Power', the path instantly diverges between 'By the people' and 'I think therefore i am'. With the creation of an institution, it becomes an entity in it's own right. It believes that since the people bestowed this power upon them, it is their moral responsibility to protect the people. Case in point - Smoking cigs are bad for your health and 80% of the people agree... So lets ban cigarettes! While we are on this topic, everyone agrees that endlessly scrolling instagram is also bad, so let's put a time limit on social media - Everyone gets an hour a day! Since this pandemic thing can happen again at any time, we might as just wear our masks forever. It's a minor inconvenience, but think of how many lives you can save! Also, this whole Covid thing really showed that there are deadly things out there that we don't understand, and since vaccine effectiveness does not seem to resonate with people we are going to break into your house and force jab ya! Oh, Vaccine effectiveness waning... Well we designed this cocktail of immunities! Mandatory for any employees in a company over 1! Also, since we are on the discussion of democracy... Do you think we can slide in alittle bill that says all mexicans gotta go back to Mexico? Think we can get 51% of the population to agree with the "We have put a man on the moon, we can build a fence!" ... Default::default("more racist, paternalistic, irrational arguments that democracy can concoct")
- lenkite 5y ago
  Governments should have the right to scan human body and minds 24x7. Think of the massive number of lives saved! This will also mean more govt jobs and better employment!
onetimeusename 5y ago
There has to be protections for minorities defined as people having minority view points. Otherwise there is tyranny of the majority. A democracy protects the rights of minorities which includes preserving their speech. That may mean allowing opposing viewpoints to take root. If the majority wants the government to outlaw and ban opposing viewpoints or speech I think that although that is the government doing the will of the people, that is undemocratic. To tie that to what the OP post is about, it mentions censorship that goes beyond what the stated purpose of the law is. I think most here are aware that that is probably intentional.

by Joeri 5y ago

mantas 5y ago

Depends on definition of „people’s rights“. If you want to ensure very basic rights, small government is fine. If you want affirmative action and all that jazz, then you’ll need big government. That will likely abuse tools meant for good to make society not free anymore.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

roenxi 5y ago

My government has just spent 2 years - a pretty significant percentage of a lifetime - working to keep me from travelling more than 5km from my home and made it illegal for me to see my friends. And I'm not even going to have a sympathetic audience if I try to claim this is against my wishes or wellbeing. Run me through, in simple terms, how much worse it could get? I suppose they aren't trying to kill me, which is a nice minimum standard? These people have no respect for my rights. They don't think my rights rate on the scale of their objectives. And they want to spy on my mail - possibly to figure out from my phone if I've gone 6km from my home? I would quite like strong encryption by default and a weak government, please.

robbiep 5y ago
Whilst you’re entitled to your opinion, it wasn’t 2 years, it was 6 months of not travelling to the regions in NSW: the rights that were protected were the rights to preservation of life as evidenced by the significantly lower excess mortality in Australia. You obviously value these things differently to me, and it’s hard to have this argument without conflating the other aspects of our federal government that I think we would absolutely agree with, but a once in several generations pandemic is a good reason to do something drastic
radicalbyte 5y ago
My government has restricted travel in order to stop a pandemic virus spreading to the point where hospitals are overwhelmed and we start seeing 10% of the population dying instead of 0.5%. Thankfully they have also implemented a nationwide vaccination scheme and a vaccination pass which is accepted pretty much anywhere worldwide.
- roenxi 5y ago
  With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a risk of 10% of the population dying. The disease isn't that deadly, even if the hospital system did give out (and the numbers I've been looking at seem to suggest that the risk of the hospital system giving out was oversold - it didn't look fun but it also didn't seem to buckle enough to justify the authoritarian response in my eyes). If I were being uncharitable towards people who basically put me under a form of house arrest - which I am - I might note that the government will only revoke my rights in a way justified by your poor grasp of the figures some of the time. Which is hardly comforting when people argue that strong governments will somehow protect me from a threat that only emanates from government. This "strong governments protect rights" argument is weak. Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government. Maybe "rights" is too strong a word, they're only applicable for about 90-95% of the time. "Privileges which only get stripped when they feel it is a good idea" is a mouthful though. The dust hasn't even settled enough to tell if the interventions worked. Anyway, they shouldn't be reading my mail. These people clearly don't represent the interests of a big chunk of the population. And me.

kragen 5y ago

That is the popular ideology that was used to justify most of history's worst atrocities. Piet Hein, who coordinated the Danish Resistance (which was, arguably, the will of the Danish people, though even today the Dansk Folkeparti has seats in parliament) satirized the situation in this grook, entitled Majority Rule, in 01969: His party was the Brotherhood of Brothers, and there were more of them than of the others. That is, they constituted that minority, which formed the greater part of the majority. Within the party, he was of the faction, that was supported by the greater fraction. And in each group, within each group, he sought the group that could command the most support. The final group had finally elected, a triumvirate whom they all respected. Now of these three, two had the final word, because the two could overrule the third. One of these two was relatively weak, so one alone stood at the final peak. He was: THE GREATER NUMBER of the pair which formed the most part of the three that were elected by the most of those whose boast it was to represent the most of most of most of most of the entire state — or of the most of it at any rate. He never gave himself a moment's slumber but sought the welfare of the greatest number. And all the people, everywhere they went, knew to their cost exactly what it meant to be dictated to by the majority. But that meant nothing, — they were the minority. ⁂ The idea of limited government I described, which is fundamental to liberalism, comes essentially from Locke's Two Treatises of Government in 01689. Rousseau responded in 01762 with the idea you so ably summarize, the absolute sovereignty of the "will of the people", in The Social Contract, calling it "the general will": https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/rousseau/social-contract/ch02.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/roussea.... Rousseau already recognized the failure mode Hein skewers in the grook above, but he hoped to avoid the formation of political parties. Condorcet's paradox showed that the will of the people was incoherent in 01785: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox In 01793, the will of the people decreed that the streets of Paris should run red with the blood of France's greatest and most honorable; Robespierre the Incorruptible carried out this Terror justified by Rousseau: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terror In 01850, the will of the people established the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring all government officials throughout the US to assist kidnappers of fugitive slaves, sending them back to the most abominable system of slavery humanity had ever known, a system itself established by the will of the people of the Southern States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850. A few short years later, the will of the people of the US decreed that those people should start killing one another en masse, ending with about a million dead, but four million delivered out of bondage. In 01918, the will of the people created the Solovki prison camp, which grew into GULAG over the next decades, through which 18 million people would be forced to labor for the will of the people; some 1.6 million died: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%A3%D0%9B%D0%90%D0%93 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%A3%D0%9B%D0%90%D0%93 In 01933, the will of the German people passed the Enabling Act, making Adolf Hitler dictator; before the war was out, the will of the people would murder ten million people in concentration camps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933 In 01951, Kenneth Arrow published his Impossibility Theorem, showing that the idea of the "will of the people" was incoherent in a far more comprehensive sense than Condorcet had ever imagined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem In 01958 the will of the Chinese people manifested in the Great Leap Forward, which Mao justified by explicit appeals to Rousseau's ideals. The largest famine in human history, or possibly the second largest, was the result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward In 01974 Hayek was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for explaining how voters and government institutions are unavoidably laboring in ignorance of much of the information needed to make the decisions that are optimal for the general welfare, while the price system can approximate those optimal decisions more closely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ... ⁂ The list of atrocities justified by the will of the people goes on and on: the Killing Fields, the Holodomor, the US system of mass incarceration, the Tutsi genocide, the Congolese civil war, the North Korean dictatorship, and on and on. You might protest that these atrocities were not in fact popular, that dictators were lying about what the people wanted; but by and large you would be incorrect. In other cases the policy of establishing limitless state power was popular, but the atrocities in which it inevitably culminated were not. That is the policy Rousseau advocated, and it is the policy you are advocating in your comment. In 01762 the idea that the will of the people could never err and would always promote the general welfare was an understandable error, but today we have ample evidence, evidence written in rivers of blood, that shows otherwise. Liberalism—giving individual people great freedom to dissent from the will of the people—works less badly. I know it's not very inspiring to chant "Our system works less badly!" but that's the best we can do so far. This does not necessarily imply "shrinking government", but it does imply strong limits on the powers in the hands of that government.

BurningFrog 5y ago

A government can be both limited and strong! Those are independent properties. If you don't see the distinction you will be hopelessly lost in these discussions.

RustyConsul 5y ago

A democratic government is a government built and run for the 51%. Technically, pure anarchy is the only form of government that is for the people by the people because... theres only the people. Not some entity set above and beyond the reaches of 'The people', with authority over the people. Not that i believe in anarchy as the epitome of governance, but Bakunin has left me slightly jaded ever since i read him in high school. I would agree with you that a free society is one that protects peoples rights. But... somewhere along the lines of social media and virtue signaling, protecting peoples right slowly transformed from the 'No-Harm principle' to 'Comply with X_Dogma or be canceled!'. This tendency has stiffled debate, taken away rights and shown the deep flaws in the democracy of a mob. Atleast in the US and the UK, these power structures that we have put in place are not for the people but are for the politicians within that government. If you are a democratic aspiring politician showing you can enforce paternalistic arguments among your populace is the key path to power. in Democracy, as soon as you put someone in 'Power', the path instantly diverges between 'By the people' and 'I think therefore i am'. With the creation of an institution, it becomes an entity in it's own right. It believes that since the people bestowed this power upon them, it is their moral responsibility to protect the people. Case in point - Smoking cigs are bad for your health and 80% of the people agree... So lets ban cigarettes! While we are on this topic, everyone agrees that endlessly scrolling instagram is also bad, so let's put a time limit on social media - Everyone gets an hour a day! Since this pandemic thing can happen again at any time, we might as just wear our masks forever. It's a minor inconvenience, but think of how many lives you can save! Also, this whole Covid thing really showed that there are deadly things out there that we don't understand, and since vaccine effectiveness does not seem to resonate with people we are going to break into your house and force jab ya! Oh, Vaccine effectiveness waning... Well we designed this cocktail of immunities! Mandatory for any employees in a company over 1! Also, since we are on the discussion of democracy... Do you think we can slide in alittle bill that says all mexicans gotta go back to Mexico? Think we can get 51% of the population to agree with the "We have put a man on the moon, we can build a fence!" ... Default::default("more racist, paternalistic, irrational arguments that democracy can concoct")

lenkite 5y ago
Governments should have the right to scan human body and minds 24x7. Think of the massive number of lives saved! This will also mean more govt jobs and better employment!

onetimeusename 5y ago

There has to be protections for minorities defined as people having minority view points. Otherwise there is tyranny of the majority. A democracy protects the rights of minorities which includes preserving their speech. That may mean allowing opposing viewpoints to take root. If the majority wants the government to outlaw and ban opposing viewpoints or speech I think that although that is the government doing the will of the people, that is undemocratic. To tie that to what the OP post is about, it mentions censorship that goes beyond what the stated purpose of the law is. I think most here are aware that that is probably intentional.